


Glory, rage and breath

by Kit



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, memory tricks, prose loops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:36:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6297457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Arrogance,” Mordin says. "A dangerous thing. Very useful. Could not graduate without it.” A pause. “Can be risky at short range.”</i>  - a glimpse of Aria T'Loak's Omega, while Nyreen was in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glory, rage and breath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caryl (Kahika)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahika/gifts).



> Thank you for this wonderful prompt, though it was heartbreaking to visit this headspace again. I hope I've done your request justice.

**GOZU DISTRICT - 2165**

It started well. Glory and rage and breath all tangled up in hope. But she was left in the dirt.

The fight was quick. There is grit in her mouth. Grit and garbage and spirits only know what else. She feels dented, skin still too open from the last biotic charge. The one that set her on her ass like a a stripling her first year out. And doesn’t _that_ make her burn? Shame settles under grazes. She shouldn’t have got in the way of that fight. Shouldn’t have left piss duty on Palavan. She was—

“Who are you?”

She was looking at a pair of boots. One tapped by her mouth.

“You’re not too dazed to speak. Answer me.”

She groans. Flinches when a strong hand curls around her carapace. “That wasn’t an answer.”

The voice is quiet. Low and clear and somehow beneath her body and against her back and in her aching head. “Nyreen,” she says. “Nyreen Kandros.”

“Ah.” Now the voice is approving. Nyreen jerks her head up, mouth flooding with a sharp shock of ozone as her biotics flare and _push._ The movement is uncontrolled - not enough power for a full charge - but strong enough that her asari interlocutor is rocked back on her heels. Empty hands curl into fists.

“I’m going to let that slide, because you’ve been hit on the head. Though I _was_ impressed that you took out three of those merc bastards, by yourself, before one of them grew smart enough to brick you,” the asari says. “Do you know who I am, Nyreen Kandros?”

Nyreen stares. An asari. Shifting and blue and arrogant as the rest of them, scaling picked out fine and sharp under the dripping shoplights in this part of Omega station. Markings bruise-dark, lips strange and smirking.

“No,” she says. “Should I?”

Startled laughter. “You _were_ hit on the head.”

Nyreen squints. Notes the leather synth of her boots. The bunched strength in the asari’s arms and the long shadows at her back. Guards, just out of sight. She swallows.

“ _Yes_ ,” she says. “I mean, yes. I know you. Now. I know _of_ you.”

“Good,” says Aria T’Loak. “Now, what are you doing in my city?”

Nyreen gets to her feet. She has a head on the leader of Omega when she does. That doesn’t stop her from wanting to squirm. She holds steady. “Learning.”

**AFTERLIFE – 2167**

“You’re learning,” Nyreen says, words almost lost against Aria’s crest.

“Hardly,” Aria sniffs. “I’ve danced _all_ the dances, Kandros.”

“Not with me,” Nyreen says. “Not yet.”

“I have no idea why I put up with you.”

“Sex,” Nyreen says.

She’s not wrong.

Nyreen is liquid under her fingers, all her joints loose and easy as she shifts in Aria’s space. She’s _humming_ : a body thing that comes more from skin than throat. To Aria, it is struck metal and swallowed song. Something deep and pleased and just at the edge of asari hearing, pressed under all the bass.

There’s nowhere to dance in Afterlife except close.

(Heartbeat close and breath close, the music pushed up through their spines and their mouths)

Aria slides her hand up her partner’s back. Grips the edge of her carapace.

“You,” she says, “Are smug, Nyreen.”

“You’re dancing with me. In the middle of all these people.”

“My people,” Aria says. She presses in, lets her lips graze the base of the other woman’s throat. Flicks her tongue down the edge where plate smooths out and softens into skin.

A gasp. “Arrogant”

Aria smirks.

**OMEGA CLINIC — 2185**

“Arrogance,” Mordin says, eyes on the grumbling batarian with a gash in his side. The clinic lights pick out every bruise and fold. Mordin reaches over to type quick commands into the patient’s omnitool. “Dangerous thing. Very useful. Could not graduate without it.” A pause. “Can be risky at short range.”

“Like hell.”

Mordin watches the Aria stalk into his clinic. Dangerous creature. Very model of a modern major dictator. Doesn’t scan. Seems to fit. The batarian with internal bleeding and high levels of aggression one of her soldiers. Makes sense that she be here. Makes a risk as well as sense.

“Arrogance,” Aria says, “Is important.”

She is not the sort of visitor to hunker down with patients. She pokes Bray in the chest, careful of stitches, but not of bruising.

“Who did this, Bray?”

Bray growls. Typical sign of batarian embarrassment. Not a repressed species naturally. Mordin sighs. War and anger. Both make the world complicated.

“Mostly wall, boss,” Bray says. “Archangel took a shot at me. Knocked me a level down into Gozu.”

“Lucky the waste issue is persistent,” Mordin says. “Most likely cushioned the fall.”

Aria’s eyes close. “Mordin,” she says. “I don’t want to order one of your new mechs to scrub you off this wall.”

“Would be difficult,” Mordin nods. “STG mechs not built for finesse.”

“Boss,” Bray says. “Can confirm that Archangel’s turian. That was clear enough.”

 

**T’LOAK WAREHOUSES — 2165**

“Well,” Aria says, smiling at the carnage Nyreen has made of sheet metal and glass. “That was clear enough.”

Nyreen is panting. Hands splayed on one rippled, dented wall, head tucked in as if, with the right amount of effort, she might disappear. When Aria opens her mouth, that changes. She turns, eyes flaring with annoyance mixed all up in hope.

“The only thing clear about that display,” she says, voice tight, is that—”

“—your kabals on Palaven didn’t know what to do with you,” Aria says, grin broadening. “Fucking _turians.”_

 _Spirits_. Nyreen wants to growl. She swallows it down, along with the taste of seat and spent charges and stale air.

She laughs on the exhale. Some of that growl goes with it. “You think you can do better?”

A table—one of the few pieces of intact furniture remaining after Nyreen’s biotics demonstration—shrieks and buckles under a tight, controlled lash from Aria.

Nyreen shudders, but she also wants to lean forward. Replay the effort in her mind and see how the asari used her biotics and muscle mass to create tight power that did not leak anywhere else in the room.

“Nyreen,” Aria murmurs. “I can make your fancy military instructors look like human children, if I want. If you want. You say you want to learn?”

“I need to.”

“And you came to this forsaken piece of junk to do it?”

“I—”

“—go on, Nyreen.”

She does growl, now. Warmth pushes up her throat, spreading through her blood until she could feel it in her face, her fingertips. “I _would,_ if you’d stop interrupting me.”

Aria folds her arms.

“You can be anything you want to be on Omega,” she says. “Isn’t that right?”

“You tell me.”

A step forward. Then another. Nyreen uses her height to lean into Aria’s space. Aria kicks her legs out, face barely flickering as Nyreen dodges quick enough for her foot to strike shielding bone.

“On Omega,” Nyreen says, “You can do whatever the fuck you want.”

They’re breathing hard. Aria’s grinning wide enough that her face must hurt. Nyreen does not reach out to touch.

“And I want to fight like this place,” Nyreen says. “Fight like this place and _for_ this place, if it doesn’t eat me up.”

Aria lifts her chin. “And I—”

“—You are Omega.”

“You’re _trouble_ , little hero.”

It’s not a kiss, in the end. Aria’s lips move, wicked at the corner of the turian’s mouth and down her throat until Nyreen curves down and Aria reaches up, fingers twining through talons, careless of cuts. Nyreen feels herself shake and laughs at it, pressed into the wall and Aria’s shoulder.

“Why are we doing this?” Nyreen manages. “You’re—we’re—”

“—Whatever. The fuck. We want.” Aria smirks. “I am a _deeply_ intuitive dictator.”

Laughter, then. Brilliant and nervous and warming as hands explored and teeth drew blood. Laughter all through first touches and new grips and startled fizz of Nyreen’s rough-trained biotics as Aria finds pressure points at waist and throat and thigh.

The wall never stands a chance.

 

**ARCHANGEL’S BRIDGE - 2185**

The mercs never stand a chance.

Aria steps through a deadfall of Blue Suns and shakes her head. The air is clogged with death. It fits her mood. It matches what she can feel from the turian at her back. Something keening and rough edged. A scream in a tired throat.

( _”I’m a very intuitive dictator.”)_

“Didn’t think I’d have the honour.” The low, flanged voice is familiar as it filters up through her omnitool from the floors above. It’s also wrong. Her teeth ache.

“You don’t.” Aria says. “There’s no honour in this. That’s just fine. Why _are_ you killing, Archangel?”

“Is ‘why not?’ an appropriate answer on this cesspool?”

“No,” Aria snaps. “That is getting alarmingly close to fucking with me.”

Clicks on the other end of the radio. “I’ve heard there was a rule about that.”

“Just one,” Aria says.

She’ll kill Bray. She’ll wait to the bastard is all healed up, then she will break him into tiny, screaming pieces. _Turian_ , he said. Yeah. _It’s her_ was the undertone, the hand on her lower back that she hadn’t even sworn at him for because her head was full of Nyreen as the sanctimonious, elusive Archangel.

_One shot a time, one merc every shot._

That is all her. It is perfect for her.

“You,” she tells Garrus Vakarian, his name a secret that burns in her gut, stewing for another day, “Are not who I want to talk to today. Kill them all, for all I care. You’re making my life easier.” She lets the pause turn ominous. Has always known how to to stretch silence into something sharp. “We can both live with that.”

 

**AFTERLIFE — 2176**

“You’re angry,” Aria says, lips thin, “I can live with that.”

They walk the lower levels of Afterlife, Nyreen never quite managing to stride ahead. There is always a bar in the way. Grizz at her left shoulder. Patriarch, eyes on them both, looking wearily amused as only a krogan can. Nyreen wants to shed her skin. Push through it the way she has broken walls and jaws and shield formations. She wants—

—Aria cups her jaw. Her eyes are hard. “I needed the Blue Suns on this job, Nyreen.”

“They’re dishonorable,” she spits.

“They’re a _mercenary company_.”

Small bones pop in Nyreen’s jaw. “You know what they did to Zaeed.”

“They’re more ruthless than the average merc company,” Aria says, unperturbed. “I need that. And they’re just that little bit more disposable,” she adds. “On account of messing up your inexplicable favourite drinking buddy.”

Nyreen is closed. Cold. Frightened, too, she thinks. But not as much as she needs to be.

_I should hate this more._

 

**AFTERLIFE — 2170**

_I should hate him more_.

The thought flickers sometimes, when she sits at a bar and watches in amused horror as Zaeed Massani brings her drink to his lips. He doesn’t swallow. Just lets the liquid tilt up, heavy and deadly, his throat open to risk until she pokes him in the side.

Human. Scarred. Acquisitive. His stories could hang all of Thessia’s moons. And he’s the best human shot she’s never seen.

(“Show me,” she’s said. More than once. “How does Jessie handle?”

“Like a goddamn dream and you’re not having any of it.”)

“Stop that,” she says now. “Kidneys are meant to filter blood. Not bleed out.”

Zaeed shrugs. “Live a little?”

“That would, in fact, be living a _very_ little.”

He laughs. “You’re goddamn annoying, Kandros,” he said. “But I think that’s part of your fucking charm.”

“Don’t patronise me,” she mutters. “You’re _not_ the better shot.”

He waves a hand in front of his bad eye, face turning goulish under strobing lights.

“Fine,” Nyreen says, low and amused as a plan unfurls — bright and a little foolish and warming all her corners. “We’ll cover my right eye the next time you’re in Aria’s pay. Get Bray or Grizz to keep a headdcount. They’re unbiased.”

Zaeed raises his own glass. Nyreen watches his throat as he drains it. “Sometimes,” he says, “I like the way you think.”

 

**GOZU DISTRICT — 2170**

“I do like the way you think.”

Nyreen laughs, head dropping forward over the map table. Her aoartnebt has been overtaken by screens, two-way mirrors and tripwires over the past few years. Zaeed helped the alarm system in exchange for backup on a nasty little Tuchanka job that she tries not to think about.

They’re _very_ good alarms. They go well with the maps. Now, Aria is close to her side, one hand casual at her waist as she looks down at Nyreen’s plans for a Red Sand haul.

“If I sell it,” she says, warmth at her friend’s approval mixing with discomfort, “I’ll know where it goes.”

Aria snorts. “Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart.”

Nyreen stiffens. “I have to. And this will work.”

“And make you rich.” Aria touches the screen, grins widely as the images brighten and grow larger under her fingertip. “You _have_ learned well.”

Nyreen sighs. “Don’t be cute. Else I won’t give you a gift my ill-gotten earnings.”

She pulls away, pacing the length of her apartment. “Let Grizz help on this one,” she says. “He wants to help.”

“Does he now?”

Aria stretches, watching as Nyreen adjusts the lighting the room, her step a long, military stride meant for planetary wars.

"How do you know the wants of my underlings, Nyreen?" 

"I know you," she says, shaking her head. The next words are twisted up with rue.  "And how people want to please you."

It’s been fascinating, watching this woman push up against her city, against _her_. Young, and fierce with it.

Liselle wants to meet her. Properly.

(“I _am_ your wicked progeny, Aria.” Soft-spoken words with an evil glint. Her daughter’s long, smirking shadow coiling over Aria’s chair. “I’d like to meet her.”

“You know her, sparks.”

“As one of your lieutenants that you occasionally screw,” she’d said, groaning with exaggerated patience. “But she doesn’t know _me_ , and it’s my job to be embarrassing.”

It’s almost impossible not to laugh around Liselle. Goddess knows where she gets that from.

_Not her father._

She’d smiled, and Liselle had stopped posturing to take her hands. A rough, quick gesture. All they’ve been comfortable with for 100 years.

“She’s _not_ just one of your fucks, Ma.” The word slips between them, both their eyes darting to security cameras. “And I’m not just the result of one. I’d like her to know _before_ I have a kid sister?”

She’d pressed a hand to Liselle’s mouth. “That is _not_ going to happen.”

“But can I meet her? Can you _tell her_? Five years is forever in her span. You mean something.”

Years shift and pull in Asari families. Looking at her daughter, Aria had felt the centuries fray apart, saw Liselle as she had been as a tiny child entranced by the noise and mess of this place. The efforts Aria had gone to to keep the precious little spark safe as she clawed her way through Omega’s power structures, and shaped them as she liked. Liselle’s mind, like any child’s started out coiled around Aria’s own. Sometimes it still feels like it might fit.

“No promises, Liselle,” she’d said.)

Now, Aria looks at Nyreen and feels old.

“You’ve worked hard on this,” she says.

Nyreen shrugs. “I’m good at it, like you said.”

“Did you really get me a gift?”

Aria doesn’t know where the words come from. There’s nothing shaky in the sound of them, but she wants to them them back. Swallow them down and spit out something less _wanting_. The apartment is too small. She should go. She—

“—are you really _asking_?”

Nothing to do save tough it out. She looks up into warm, green eyes and manages a smirk as her pupils thin with pleased surprise. “I just did, Nyreen.”

Nyreen’s hands clench. Release.

“You’ll laugh,” she mutters.

“I might, but you still need to _show_ me first.”

Nyreen reaches into one of her cupboards. When she pulls away, heavy white fabric spills over her hands. There is a symbol, picked out in black. The same old earth Greek letter that is stamped on every shipment on this station.

“Omega,” Aria breathes.

“Leaders need symbols.” Nyreen is behind her now, the air at her back warming with almost-touch.

“I have Patriarch!”

“This,” Nyreen whispers, as Aria turns a shoulder, raises an arm, “Is decidedly more portable.”

“I’m not laughing,” Aria says. “See?”

“I do.”

The words are a low growl as Aria arches her back, the jacket falling to a better fit. She cups Nyreen’s face, relishing the burn in her arm at the uncomfortable angle. “I think I’ll keep this,” she says. “But no promises.”

**2186 - THE CITADEL**

“Aria, I can make no promises.” The asari councilor’s holographic image looks like it needs seven drinks and ten years of sleep. She glares minutely at Aria from her wrist.

Aria glares back.

“Yeah, Tevos,” she says, “But you can steal some.”

She is raw. Splintered inside her skin. Bray keeps pacing in the docking bay, but she is kept still. Trapped between grimy, unfamiliar walls and recycled air. When the Keepers move, Aria is half sure she can feel their skittering metal steps all up her body. She does not scream. She has not screamed.

Petrovsky chased her from Omega with only the clothes on her back.

“If Shepard’s here,” she snaps, ignoring Tevos’s closed eyes and tiny flinch. “I’m using them. And get me the hell out of this bay.”

There are scorch marks on her jacket. The synth bubbles where it isn’t burned. Hand prints stand out clearly. She remembers Patriarch’s rage. They’d fed each other, anger meeting anger and growing into something as beautiful and destructive as the daughter they’d once had, before half this dull station had even been born. He’d charged Petrovsky. Broken a dozen of the bastard’s ribs before the shields regenerated. Screamed the same call Aria felt in her bones the she challenged him, and the years afterward where they circled and grew and shrank back according to nature and strategy and time.

His death was senseless as Liselle’s and no one used the name his clan had given him.

(Don’t think about it. Don’t.

“I’m Patrarch, you smug sack of shit. I am going to separate you from your ass.”

Petrovsky had smiled.

Smug sack of shit.)

Aria tears off her jacket. She does not gasp. She does not shake. She thrusts the wadded, dirty fabric into Bray’s hands.

“Get this cleaned,” she snaps.

“Yes, boss.”

 

**OMEGA - BASE CAMP - 2168**

“Bray,” Aria says, not looking away from Nyreen’s face as her people busle and hijack and swarm with Commander Shepard goading them along as if she really did run the fucking universe, “Don’t let Nyreen out of your sight.”

“Yes, boss.”

Nyreen glowers. “Is that truly necessary?”

“You tell me.”

“I—”

“—left,” Aria says, steady. “Or never left. Both options are deeply upsetting. Great cape, by the way. Very much the vigilante look you were trying to avoid. It’s good on you. Knew it would be.”

“Aria—”

“—Don’t,” Aria says. “Just…don’t.”

 

**GOZU DISTRICT – 2180**

“Don’t. Just…

“That’s the plan.”

The words are rough and there is laughter in them. Sharp, inward laughter that makes Aria want to break things. She’s running out of targets. Nyreen packs as she talks, the apartment she’s shaped returning to its original empty state.

“Is this an attack of conscience, Nyreen?” Aria trips over her own sneer. “You’ve enjoyed killing every criminal thug you can lay your hands on, sweetheart.”

 “That’s…that’s the problem,” whispers.

“What?  _Enjoyment?”_ Aria stares at her, watching in slow horror as the turian lets off a long, low hum of distress. “Fucking  _turians_ —”

“—Don’t say it,” Nyreen snaps. “I have to do this.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Aria says. “You care about Omega so much—and you  _enjoy_ your work so much—that you have to leave. Of course. It makes perfect sense.”

“You.”

For a quiet word, it falls hard.

“Excuse me?”

“I have to leave  _you.”_ Nyreen steps forward, reaching out and down to cup Aria’s shoulder, white leather crumpling under the touch.

“So you say,” Aria says, voice soft and precise. “Elaborate.”

“My song.” The words gentle as she stepped away. “You are a deeply intuitive dictator.”

Aria laughed. She laughed hard, and she laughed raw, her hands falling to her knees, shoulders shaking. “I,” she said, the pattern made by her words filling her mouth, “ _Am_ Omega.”

“Not all of it,” Nyreen says. "Not any more."

The air is acrid and thick with biotics. Nyreen’s shields buckle as a lash catches her from the side. It leaves her sprawling. Aria stares down at her in a mix of hurt and disgust that burns in her throat.

“Well,” Aria says, extending a hand. “You have been perfectly clear.”

Nyreen takes her hand.

Aria lifts her chin. “If I may,” Aria says, The words are stilted, formal. They settle like ice everywhere Nyreen’s flesh meet plate. “I would like to offer some clarity of my own.”

“I—”

“—Humour me.”

Aria’s eyes are fixed on hers, the markings between her brows shifting as frowned. She does not release Nyreen’s arm, does not smile as the Nyreen lowers her head to rest her forehead against her lover’s. A final, weary farewell.

Aria’s body aches with a faint charge as she lets herself slip and fade and search. The trick every asari learns in childhood. The moment where she—even blunt and knotted up with fury—can touch the edges of things.

Her eyes grow wide and dark. She feels the patterns of the Nyreen’s mind brush her own, wary and raw.

Years together, and the two of them never melded. Nyreen has never asked, and it is not an intimacy easily offered. Now, they stand together, caught up in the jagged, aching mess of noise that make up the other’s distress, until neither will forgive the other for it.

 

**GOZU DISTRICT 2186**

_You’re not forgiven._

Aria does not say it out loud. Too many people. Shepard, full of adrenaline and the promise of all the damn eezo they could want if they’d only just _leave_ , tends to hover.

 _You’re not forgiven, little hero_.

The blast had taken all the bodies. Nyreen is mixed up in scraps of adjutant now. Ash has stuck to all of them. She imagines the dead seeping through into the living, _that_ , out of sheer, ridiculous horror, does make her laugh.

“Shock,” says Mordin. “Problematic.”

Aria whirls on him. “You’re not pretending to be a fucking doctor these days, Solus. So shut up.”

“No pretence, T’Loak,” he says, a faint smile wreathing his features in a way she found downright unsettling.

“I preferred you when you were attaching trespassers to grenade launchers.”

She pushes away. He does not follow.

_You are not forgiven._

She kneels. There’s a stir about it behind her, sticking in that dim part of her awareness that knows anyone can knife her in the back, but she still bends forward, finger trailing through ash and debris until there is a talon sigil at her feet.

_You are not forgiven._

It started well. Glory and rage and breath all tangled up in hope. But she was left in the dirt.

 


End file.
